The Curious Case of Benjamin Button scores not because of its blinding star power, but due to director David Fincher’s fearless decision to buck conventional wisdom and tell a sprawling story in bold, sentimental, sometimes even eccentric strokes. A less courageous film maker would have axed the rich side stories, trimmed the sometimes rambling diversions, and hewed to a more linear narrative. Thank goodness that didn’t happen. Fincher, famous for Zodiac, Fight Club, and Se7en, has always displayed a penchant for the twisted, and the shocking, but has consistently shied away from more full blooded storytelling. Not so here. With The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, he breaks free, or, perhaps more appropriately, breaks through.

            Because make no mistake: This is a superb film, one of finest of the year.

            Based very loosely on the eponymous 1921 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it recounts the life of Benjamin Button, played in adulthood by Brad Pitt. Benjamin experiences life backward. Born in a state of advanced, near-death decrepitude, he ages in reverse – at a normal pace – all the way back to infancy. He arrives, a bawling, wrinkled nightmare, in New Orleans on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. His mother dies giving birth. His father, owner of a thriving neighborhood button factory, panics, runs out into the streets, hiding his bizarre offspring in a mass of swaddling cloth, and abandons him on the steps of an old age home.

            The bookend conceit of the film, totally absent from the short story, is that a noted local clockmaker, a blind and, according to the voice-over, now semi-legendary figure in New Orleans history, is hired by the city to design a giant clock for the downtown train station. Just after receiving this commission, he learns that his only son has been cut down in battle during one of the final engagements of World War I. In his grief, he builds the time piece to run in reverse. At its unveiling, he announces that it is his hope the action of the clock might permit those who have been killed in the line of duty to return home and live out normal lives. This clock’s inaugural movement triggers the retro-chronological process of Benjamin’s life. This bears more than a passing resemblance to the violin maker’s paint in Francois Girard’s The Red Violin. The sheer power of the clock maker’s anguish leads to a hiccup in the working of the cosmos.

            The film then follows, traveling in several directions at once, stopping to consider things here, and pausing to listen for a while there, Benjamin’s inverted development from invalid to man to boy to toddler. The unifying thread running through the movie is his seemingly preordained love affair with Daisy, a red-haired girl whose imposing grandmother resides at the old age home. Daisy and Benjamin, children of the same intellectual and emotional age but separated by seventy-plus biological years, forge a relationship we as viewers know will overlap at some point in the years to come, given the fact they are aging toward one another.  We also suspect that it cannot end well.

            The film tracks all this by flashback. It uses the last hours of Daisy’s life as its story-telling platform. Daisy, played with urgent maturity by Cate Blanchett, is attended at her death bed by her daughter Caroline (the well-cast Julia Ormond). Daisy, now in her late eighties, asks Caroline to read to her from a battered old diary - not hers as it turns out, but Benjamin’s. This opens a window into Benjamin’s past and establishes the framework for the rest of the film.

            During the movie’s exceptional first half, its formative acts, dozens of peripheral characters cross paths with Benjamin. Each adds a kernel of understanding to his world view and sense of self. The black earth mother who takes him in and raises him. The bombastic faith-healer. The wandering African tribesman trying to find his way back to the river of his childhood. The man who has been struck by lightning seven times (a personal favorite). The tattooed tugboat skipper. The diplomat’s wife who tries to swim the English Channel. The piano teacher. 

            This rich tapestry is the brainchild of veteran screenwriter Eric Roth. Roth wrote the script for 1994's Forrest Gump, another large-scale, semi-fantasy bioficpic. The two films share several traits; a virginal protagonist who discovers sex early but love late, a rolling cast of odd-ball characters, a certain supra-historical distance.  Roth has imported the title, and captured the aging backward concept, but the rest is completely his own. And we are much the better for it. Fitzgerald’s original story is unsuitable for cinematic rendition without serious structural expansion. If this film were a stew, Fitzgerald’s story would be the bullion, supplying the thin but crucial baseline taste. Roth’s screenplay would be the meat and potatoes.

            Roth’s abiding affection for the magic of the place permeates the film, but is most clearly evident in the first half. Benjamin is endowed with a unique gift; the ability to derive joy from his surroundings, no matter how prosaic they may be. His description of the old age home in the dead of night is a beautiful example; the creaking of the floorboards, the scurrying of the mice, the flutter of the curtains in the night breeze, the breathing of the residents in their beds.  The gift flows naturally from his singular situation. He is an octogenarian whose mind is, instead of shutting down in age, awakening in youth to the wonders all around him.

            The central love theme dominates the film’s weaker second half. The lengthy idyllic period scenes constitute the movie’s greatest liability. They are a bit too pat, and crawl along at a snail’s pace. However, the movie regains its steam as Benjamin nears the end of his life.

            At the heart of the film, of course, stands Pitt, the Robert Redford of our time. His delivery is so uncannily like Redford’s, especially in moments of intimate dialogue, that many viewers (this one included) will likely do an occasional double take. His performance is clipped, unadorned, and direct; absolutely without artifice. He, like Redford in The Natural, is the quintessential American golden boy; a Norman Rockwell portrait incarnate And, again like Redford, his straightforwardness conceals a complex and haunted side. This is his signal brilliance. He allows the audience to see the pain, but only in glimpses, through the cracks in his aw-shucks facade.

            Blanchett’s swanlike elegance perfectly balances Pitt’s easy, homespun grace. She embodies personal and professional intensity, he the unrushed power of the moment. This is why they work so very well together onscreen.

            From a genre perspective, the notion of a person aging backward is not new. T.H. White employed the device in his1958 Arthurian romance The Once and Future King, In it, Merlin the Magician ages in reverse. In Dan Simmons’s Hugo-winning 1989 novel Hyperion, archaeologist  Rachel Weintraub  is exposed to “anti-entropic” fields while studying the Sphinx, one of the Time Tombs of the mysterious (and bloodthirsty) Shrike. As a result, she begins to live backward, with tragic consequences. In the short story upon which this film is based, F. Scott Fitzgerald satirizes middle-class American life by its use – poking fun at the transparent pettiness of daily existence. His Benjamin Button is born not just biologically but also intellectually old. He comes into the world a cigar-chomping old coot and slowly ages into a callow little boy.  There is little to recommend the story other than its luminous closing passages, wherein Benjamin experiences the inchoate blankness of his own creation then winks out of existence.

            This is a big movie, nearly three hours in length. It is truly grand in scope. But the colossal backdrop serves only to refine and heighten the piercing love between Benjamin and Daisy. Without their love story, with its quietly devastating finish, the film’s diverse elements would fly apart, and its magic would disappear. With it, the film soars.

Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros.
U.S. Release Date: December 25, 2008
Director: David Fincher
Screen writer: Eric Roth (from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Running Time: 159 minutes